In today’s hectic and uncaring world, it’s important to guard the boundaries of your soul. Psychic Shield: The Personal Handbook of Psychic Protection will teach you all the practical and commonsense strategies necessary to defend yourself against any damaging external forces you may encounter.

Whether you’re a skilled psychic, a budding empath, or simply someone looking for answers, Psychic Shield offers a number of practices, meditations, and rituals to help you protect yourself and your inner peace.

The Ancient Art of Psychic Protection

What does psychic protection conjure up in your imagination? An entranced shaman whirling to the beat of a drum? An evangelical minister wrestling with the possessed at the alter? Buffy the Vampire Slayer with stake and hammer? Or is it the exorcist struggling to subdue evil with a well-placed Bible and light-bestowing crucifix? Isn’t it interesting that few of the images that come to mind are familiar or from our own time, except those from TV or movies? We have grown unfamiliar with such strange skills that have become mythologized and distant from our own society.

The art of psychic protection is not a new skill. It is a very ancient one found in every time, place and culture. Throughout the history of the world, ordinary people have been careful to observe wise customs and maintain the boundaries between themselves and spiritual harm. These simple, domestic and ordinary skills were known to everyone. And for the more difficult kinds of psychic disturbance, we have always needed people who can stand at the borders between the known and the unknown, to bring spiritual peace to psychic disturbance, to detect the cause of strange happenings, to arbitrate and calm perturbations in the night, to lead unquiet spirits to their rightful place.

How on earth can we learn this ancient skill? Where can we learn and benefit from the strategies? And why should we learn it at all, you may ask? We desperately need these skills in our times because other people and factors are affecting us all the time and we don’t have a clue what to do about them. We don’t even have a trained set of psychic protectors to call upon anymore: they’re not in any directory. This book will not enable you to set up a business as a certified psychic protector, but it does have rituals, practices and strategies that have been used from ancient times and that still work now. You learn them by implementing them.

One thing that most of our images of psychic protectors have in common is their dynamic way of dealing with psychic disturbance. Psychic protectors don’t meekly apologize for existing and cast a bit of holy water about to disperse the problem; they stand firmly in a place of spiritual support and deal with psychic disturbances forthrightly and confidently.

This is why we begin this book by reminding ourselves just how reality and spirit work in this universe, and try to understand why psychic disturbance happens in the first place. Nothing can replicate spiritual confidence, but we can begin by considering our own connection to spiritual sources of help.

The Cause and Effect of Psychic Disturbance

All around us, every day, we see how the short-term, expedient and greedy actions of people are endangering our world from the global and political level down to the local and personal. By failing to understand how our everyday world is but one side of reality, humankind finds the universe a confusing and dangerous place.
Resistance to the Otherworld and to metaphysical reality impedes our understanding of cause and effect. How we deal with the challenges of physical reality must also be the concern of all who want to live more responsibly.

All deeds, thoughts and intentions have effects upon both physical and metaphysical sides of reality. By disregarding these, we cause, and suffer from, psychic disturbance. But how can we measure the unseen effect on our lives? Throughout this book are scattered many stories of people who have encountered psychic disturbance. You will notice that each of these stories has an epicenter from which shock waves ripple out like earthquake tremors, shaking everything in that person’s life with psychic disturbance. This is the result of cause and effect—something we ignore far too often.

The ripples set up from unconsidered cause and effect are what are called psychic disturbance: these ripples hit the soul first, and when the soul is disturbed, we also experience physical symptoms. If you throw a brick at a window, the glass will shatter. The physical results are clearly demonstrable. But what happens when you harbor ill-will, jealousy or resentment against another person? The metaphysical effect is just as demonstrable. How does it manifest? Well, consider those who live on the receiving end of their neighbors’ racist opinions. They will tell you that it makes them feel unsafe, wary, under threat. Such resentment is experienced by the soul as a feeling of threat and by the instinct as a feeling of insecurity.

By becoming impervious to the metaphysical side of reality, we have ceased to relate what subsequently results from our unguarded acts, words and thoughts to its causation. But becoming responsible for what we say, do, think and intend, as well as for the effects they bring, is the first step to bringing peace to our lives. It will prevent us from bringing psychic disturbance to others.

We cannot stop psychic disturbance from happening, but by tracing it back to the moment that the stone fell into the pool and started the ripple-spread that you now experience, you can begin to change things with the help of your Advocates (see page 20). Better still, you can prevent causing it in the first place. Like a chess player who considers the whole board before moving a piece, you can use these questions to help you determine how any of your
plans or actions might affect the universe.

• From what motivation do my intentions arise?
• What are the consequences of my intended action?
• Who or what might it harm?
• How will these intentions affect me?
• Are my intentions motivated by someone else’s needs, desires, or coercion?
• Who am I trying to please/impress by doing this?

See page 265 for some more questions that help determine your effect on the universe.

We all need psychic protection strategies in ordinary everyday life. Adrift from our soul’s core, we tend to cast about ourselves for solutions, often becoming prey to charlatans who are more psychically streetwise than we are. By noticing cause and effect, we grow wiser and more careful and we will harp less upon how sources of good and evil cause psychic disturbance.